Re-creating high fashion: dressmaking project with fabric from Tissura

We get inspiration from all around us for creative projects and sometimes seeing something you like but wanting to change it to suit your own style is the most straight forward way. Years ago when I was avidly catching all the premier designer fashion shows, I was also watching out for the celebrities to see what they wore. Sometimes what’s on the front row is just as good as what is being paraded down the runway!

There was one such Asian celebrity who wore what I thought was an interesting gown. It was made with textured rose pink coloured fabric, was short-sleeved and was the length of a coat, but was in fact a dress with a short zip of around 6 inches which meant the celebrity had to wear shorts underneath. Somehow the length and style of the dress really fascinated me. In Scotland, you wouldn’t catch me wearing the dress with short shorts underneath, but it was one that definitely stayed in my mind!

Note: This post is written with the support of Tissura. I would like to say a big thank you for their support and for providing the fabric for this project.

While browsing the collection of cotton fabrics available on Tissura (you can read all about my previous post about the range of designer fabrics here), I found this beautiful floral printed cotton lawn fabric from Liberty London that I felt would be the perfect fabric for my upcoming project.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you may remember me making a box pleat tea party dress with Chinese-painting style floral print (you can see the dress I made here). I used to think big or small floral prints would make me look old-fashioned, but whether it does or not, I’ve really come to love big floral printed fabric, especially if it has an artistic style to it, like a painting.

Beautiful china blue floral printed cotton lawn fabric from Tissura

What do you think?

My intention is to make a similar dress to the premier fashion designer dress that I saw several years back: to make a midi-length dress that will be open right down the centre of the front, but will have a short zip which will run from my breastbone to about my hip bone. This will evidently leave the bottom half quite exposed, but as the celebrity in mind wore short shorts (because she had the boyish model-like figure to pull it off), my intention is to wear slightly more dressy leggings and boots to make up for it.

I tried finding similar style dresses to show you exactly what I intend to make, but as I had made a shirt dress as my first dressmaking project (see here) and I’m planning on using the same pattern Style 2104, but instead of joining the skirt after the zip, I’ll be using a two-way shorter zip and leaving the skirt open.

As with my previous dresses that I made using this pattern, I will be shortening the sleeve to about half or 3/4 length and I’ll be leaving out the pockets as well. I’ve not quite yet tried making hidden pockets in dresses or skirts yet, but at the same time I haven’t really used pockets that have been provided and prefer to keep my personal belongings in bags I carry with me.

I might not have similar style dresses to show you, but to give you an idea of how it could look with a little bit of imagination, here are some dresses with front zips that I thought were similar enough to give me an idea of what I’ll be making.